Here’s one of my shortcomings: I’ve let the passion for doing things myself keep several projects from seeing the light of day. Actually, it’s 50 percent passion and 50 percent stubbornness that have stopped cars, trucks, and boats from being finished in a timely manner. Well, beer, racing, and a small case of outright laziness have slowed that progress to a crawl, too, but let’s stay focused on the real problem.

Rather than let another builder touch my stuff, even if it meant better results, I’d either wait until my skills were honed enough to sufficiently do the job or let the project languish until I was good and ready to tackle it. It’s the reason I own more tools than clothes. The hiccup with this approach to being a hot rodder is that it inevitably results in perfection becoming a Great Wall of China–sized roadblock to progress.

I’ve had three boxes of mandrel-bent tubing and laser-cut flanges from Hedman sitting in my cubicle for months. These are the parts I envisioned becoming an awesome pair of fenderwell headers for my ’55 Bel Air. Prefab headers won’t do because my car has a Hemi shoehorned into it, and nobody makes swap parts for my oddball combo. At the time I picked up the parts, I wasn’t happy enough with my TIG-welding abilities to attempt the fabrication of the pipes--but I didn’t want to farm out the work either. Not because I’m a cheap S.O.B. but because I wanted to build ’em myself. So I practiced welding on smaller, less-conspicuous projects. Months went by and I still wasn’t seeing dimes continuously roll out of my torch and onto metal, so the header parts kept gathering dust. I was literally ignoring the tubing out of disgust over my lack of talent, and so my car sat unfinished because the headers were first up in a long line of work it needed.

2/2If I had a do-over on these pipes, I’d notch the framerails of the Jim Meyer Racing chassis rather than make the 21⁄8-inch primary tubes exit the flanges at such a sharp angle. I didn’t have the heart to destroy the shiny powdercoating.

Finally, I was forced into putting my car together to make a deadline--it seems that’s the only way we get cars built around here--and I had to make a choice: either sack up and build the pipes myself or let someone else do it. Initially, I gave into the desire for a perfect set of headers and was going to ask our shop manager Grant Peterson to weld them. He gets down with a TIG torch like no other, so I knew the end result would be impressive. But then I realized that most of the enjoyment I get from this hobby is fabricating, so I put my pride aside and locked myself in the shop for three days of cutting and welding.

Are these the greatest pipes ever? Hell no. You can clearly see where my welding improved as I progressed from one pipe to the next. Am I embarrassed? Nope. My headers won’t leak, they will flow decently, and the beads are OK. Most importantly, the pipes are finished, and I am days away from lighting the Hemi off and finally driving my car, and that beats the hell out of a stack of dimes any day of the week and twice on Sunday.